"Was German Unification Inevitable?" Topic

"There was once a time when German historians searched avidly for the emergence of the ‘first German state' or ‘first Reich'. Usually they discovered it sometime in the late ninth or early tenth century. Unity, they were convinced, was the German people's destiny and destination. Understandably and rightly, the days of such thinking are long gone.

The long view seems still less defensible when we remember that the ‘German state' that emerged out of the collapse of Charlemagne's Frankia was the Holy Roman Empire, long a byword for political sleepiness and more recently championed as pre modern prototype for the trans-national EU. The fact that after its demise in 1806 the Empire appeared such an unappealing form of German statehood explains why no modern German state, whether in 1871, 1918, 1933, 1949, or 1990, staked any serious claim to its inheritance. Successive incarnations of modern German statehood have tended to appear instead as bolts from the blue, chance strokes of good or ill fortune…"

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From History Today